Dungeon Funtimes

My first exposure to the D&D alignment system was in old DOS games where you could pick your alignments from what looked to me like a jumble of words like "good" and "chaotic." I didn't understand what any of the terms meant, and they all looked like "chaotic true neutral good" to me. Now, of course, I understand that an alignment like that is impossible on the good-evil, lawful-chaotic axes, and I promise I'm rolling my eyes at my younger self just as hard as you are. Hillsfar was my favorite of the few old SSI games we had, because it was basically a burglary simulator. Yes, it also had an archery simulator and an arena simulator and a brute-force-password-cracker simulator (because your older siblings lost the copy-protection code wheel years ago), but the best things to do involved breaking into buildings and looting them. Even if you liked fighting in the arena, you could loot buildings until you were caught and thrown in the arena. T...

Lately, I've seen a lot of DMs who are running or who'd like to run an "open-world" D&D adventure. A lot of excellent video games are open-world, and one of the biggest advantages tabletop games have over video games is the ability to go off-script. A traditional video game is built up of relatively small, obsessively-designed maps with borders you can't go beyond. In D&D, you're only limited by your imagination, game balance and what you feel is right for the fiction. But how do you build an open-world game without going so far that things seem pointless? How do you make a world where players can go anywhere and still make sure there's something for players to do? Take any road you want When I think about about open-world games in D&D, I keep coming back to the first game in that style I ever played: The Legend of Zelda . There's a lot the Nintendo classic can teach DMs about world design. Of course, classic video games can't co...

You don't have to watch the new posts on Reddit's /r/DnD for very long before you see a story of a party that got killed or thrown in the dungeon or something because they started a fight in town. The DM often asks something like, "Am I good?" If everybody had fun, then yes, you're good. If the players are so salty that tired horses are wandering down the stairs and into the basement to lick them, then you have a problem. Sometimes, that problem is a difference in expectations between players and DMs. Players might not understand that there's a focus on consequences in D&D, and DMs might not understand that they're provoking the players. Case study: Tom Petty was right Sometimes the waiting is the hardest part. DM /u/Enddar tells the story on Reddit of how their party was basically started a fight in a waiting room and was killed. They adventurers were on their way to see the king, and a captain acting as their guide was admitted, but a mage ...

One of the most unique aspects of roleplaying games is that players aren't just players — they're also characters and audiences. But that means that sometimes, for the sake of the story, that they need to be careful not to let their desires as audience members influence their actions as characters. Metagaming is when a player acts on information their character doesn't have, usually spoiling the fun for the other players. The idea is that since the character is a different person who grew up in a different world and has had unique experiences, there are a lot of things that the character knows that the player doesn’t, and vise versa. I don’t know how to cook a delicious pie, but my 160-year-old half-elven grandma sorcerer Nina does. Likewise, Nina does not own a Monster Manual, and therefore she doesn’t know the challenge rating and vulnerabilities of every evil creature she may meet. OOC talk Some new players get metagaming mixed up with out-of-character talk. Wh...

Sammy the Snek was leading her party on a mission to break into the mayor's mansion and retrieve a ledger proving the mayor is in cahoots with an evil cult. Things seemed to be going pretty well on the way in, but on the way out, the party ran into trouble. They'd chosen to break into the mansion in broad daylight, and several neighbors had seen the party unlock and sneak in through a window. When they came out the same window, the city guard was waiting with an ambush they couldn't roll their way out of. The party was apprehended and thrown in the dungeon. Here's the problem, though: Sammy the Snek is a burglar by trade. She's been breaking into houses for years and has never been caught. Sammy's friends in the city's underbelly are shocked — she should have known better. It just doesn't make sense that Sammy would botch the job with such a rookie mistake. Reverse metagaming In forum discussions of this situation, many people would blame the ...